Apollinarius

APOLLINARIUS

(Aizanoi, Phrygia, fl. first or early second century CE)

astronomy.

Apollinarius was among the most prominent Greek astronomers of the time immediately preceding Ptolemy, a period in the history of Greek astronomy about which scholars are very poorly informed. His chief contributions were apparently in lunar theory.

In his second century CE commentary on Hippocrates’s Airs, Waters, Places(c. 400 BCE), a work extant only in Arabic translation, Galen found occasion to attack intellectuals of his time living at Rome for their ignorance of the writings of the most important astronomers. Among them he lists Apollinarius of Aizanoi (a city in Phrygia) along with Hipparchus (second century BCE), two other men otherwise unknown, and—if the name is not an interpolation in the Arabic text—Ptolemy (second century CE). Like Galen’s catalogue of astronomers as a whole, Apollinarius is emblematic of the tenuous knowledge of Greco-Roman science, for though he is frequently mentioned in sources, none of his works has survived or is even known by title.

One specimen of Apollinarius’s writings survives, a passage of about five hundred words quoted in a fragment of an anonymous commentary on Ptolemy’s Handy Tables, composed in the early third century CE and fortuitously preserved in a medieval astrological manuscript. Apollinarius begins by defining terms for the various periodicities associated with the Moon—the synodic month and the sidereal, anomalistic, and dracontic months—and he explains how the Moon’s anomalistic motion, characterized by its varying distance from the Earth, affects the length of the synodic month. The bulk of the passage, however, sets out Apollinarius’s correct contention that the Moon’s motion in latitude, reckoned as its progress in the plane of its orbit relative to the nodal line, is also affected by the anomaly, contrary, he says, to what the “Chaldeans” (Babylonian astronomers) believed. Hence, if one seeks a precise value for the dracontic month by comparing pairs of observed lunar eclipses widely spaced in time, ideally one ought to look for eclipses such that the Sun and Moon are in the same situations with respect to their anomalies as well as at precisely the same locations in the zodiac; these conditions, however, cannot be fulfilled within a span shorter than “many myriads of years.” The fragment breaks off at this point, but it is enough to show that Apollinarius was criticizing the kind of approach to measuring lunar periodicities that Ptolemy attributes to Hipparchus in Book IV of the Almagest.

The late-second-century astrologer Vettius Valens claims to have used Apollinarius’s tables for computing positions of the Sun and Moon, and that these tables employed the Babylonian convention according to which the vernal equinoctial point is at the eighth degree in Aries, not the beginning of the sign as Hipparchus and Ptolemy assumed. From numerical details given elsewhere in Valens’s work, it appears that Apollinarius’s lunar tables were of a type well-known from Greco-Egyptian papyri, using Babylonian-style zigzag functions to represent the Moon’s daily motion in longitude and argument of latitude. By contrast, Paul of Alexandria (fourth century CE) and Porphyry (third century CE) both group Apollinarius with Ptolemy as astronomers who computed ascensional arcs by means of spherical trigonometry rather than the Babylonian arithmetical methods in common use.

Apollinarius

Apollinarius or Apollinaris (c.310–c.390). Christian heretic. Although as bishop of Laodicea he was an orthodox opponent of Arianism, his christological teaching was condemned, finally in 381 at the Council of Constantinople. He left the church c.375. Apollinarianism is the view which defends the divine nature in Christ by refusing to allow that there could be moral development during his lifetime. There can be a human body and soul, but the Logos replaces the human spirit and is thus not subject to change. Such a view, according to opponents, means that Christ was not fully human.

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Apollinarianism

The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.

Copyright The Columbia University Press

Apollinarianism (əpŏlĬnâr´ēənĬzəm), heretical doctrine taught by Apollinaris or Apollinarius (c.315–c.390), bishop of Laodicea, near Antioch. A celebrated scholar and teacher, author of scriptural commentary, philosophy, and controversial treatises, he propounded the theory that Jesus possessed the Logos in place of a human mind, and hence, while perfectly divine, he was not fully human. Apollinarianism was popular in spite of its repeated condemnation, particularly by the First Council of Constantinople. It anticipated Monophysitism.

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